There are significant issues with national parks as vehicles for teaching people about the environment. The first is that equating parks with environment tends to imply that everywhere else is NOT environment, which couldn’t be farther from the truth. For example the world couldn’t solve its environmental problems by creating more parks. A field trip to the schoolyard to count all the insects in it, or better a garden plot in the schoolyard where kids can see a seed become a plant that’s pollinated by a bee and then produces something you can eat—- that’s real environmental education.

Parks are (or are supposed to be) wilderness… nature as it is without the presence of humans. Of course anyone who’s stayed in one of those packed campgrounds would laugh at that notion! But even in the backcountry there really is no such thing as a place no man has touched. People have been altering the landscape for millenia (and not just Europeans, either). This became such an issue in the US Forest Service many staff there have stopped referring to goals of restoring “pristine” or “untouched” places.. they know there aren’t any. Instead the goal is a return to “pre-European conditions.”

Anyway, I’m not say to eliminate parks. They’re good habitat for animals. But they’re not so good for people. Majestic parks encourage people to idealize and fetishize nature, make it into porn of a kind, instead of seeing it as the world they interact with every day. And that’s a danger.

Cheers!